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Lloyd Walker @lloydwalker

: entrepreneur, futurist, designer, maker Austin, TX Joined November 2008
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Balaji @balajis

2 years ago

PROMPTS ARE TINY PROGRAMS We’re now about 18 months into the AI revolution. One thing that was uncertain in late 2022 was whether prompt engineering would be around to stay, or whether better AI would quickly obviate it. I now think it’s around to stay and I have an explanation that makes sense to me, at least: prompt engineering is just a subset of software engineering. That is, prompts are tiny programs written in natural language. But the API isn’t specified and varies between models. So guessing the right “function calls” with clever use of vocabulary is a huge part of the game. On the other hand, even if you don’t guess *exactly* the right words to use, the model will often do what you mean. This is different from how we normally think of an API, which is both more legible and more fragile. The exact words to make an API do what you want are written down, but if you don’t say those exact words it won’t do what you want. Even given this difference, the concept of prompts as tiny programs using hidden APIs helps explain the bizarre magic associated with specific phrases. I’m reminded of Quake3’s fast inverse square root[1,2], which has a famously obscure incantation in C that just so happened to deliver a 4X speedup. More code now looks like that, and it makes sense. C is how you talk to machines and English is how you talk to humans. So, just like you write part of a large application in C for performance, you’ll also write part of it in English for dealing with unstructured data. You can go further with this analogy. Once you think of prompts as code, you can probably generate model-aware syntax highlighters for favored keywords. You can maybe automatically generate API-like docs from a model for the most common use cases. And you can think of every new model you add to your codebase as roughly analogous to adding a new programming language — because just as it takes time for someone to ramp up on the idioms of Rust, they’ll need to play around with the latest Mistral to get the hang of how to talk to it. Anyway — this is all probably obvious to folks spending 100% of their time in the field, and is similar to some of the things @karpathy has posted about, but at least for me it was a useful articulation of why prompts are around to stay: prompts are tiny programs. [1]: stackoverflow.com/questions/1349… [2]: beyond3d.com/content/articl…

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Omar Khattab @lateinteraction

2 years ago

We started this project thinking LMs can’t be prompted to do classification tasks with over 10,000 classes — especially when documents are long! But the incredible @KarelDoostrlnck found this elegant DSPy program that, once optimized on ~50 examples, sets the state of the art.

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Lloyd Walker @lloydwalker

3 years ago

@andrewbusey ULM

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Lloyd Walker @lloydwalker

3 years ago

@calebpike Balloon

Lloyd Walker retweeted
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Barsee 🐶 @heyBarsee

3 years ago

Chat GPT is the Most Powerful AI tool. But most People don't know how to use it for their Benefit. Here are 13 techniques to get massively ahead in 2023 by using Chat GPT:

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Lloyd Walker @lloydwalker

3 years ago

@garrygolden Take good pictures of your shelves and stacks first. Good pictures of the covers of the books that are associated with important memories or milestones. Makes it easier to let go and the visual index can be fun and important later.

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Lloyd Walker @lloydwalker

4 years ago

@nraford Nice run. Job well done. You took on a big project and delivered.

Lloyd Walker retweeted
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Andrew Price @andrewpprice

4 years ago

The big forces shaping the next decade of 3D. What else?

Lloyd Walker retweeted
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Pete Barbrook-Johnson @bapeterj

4 years ago

📕📣 NEW BOOK 📕 📣 Systems mapping: how to build and use causal models of systems by me and @DrAlexPenn, published by @Palgrave Take a look - it’s open access with a *FREE PDF* link.springer.com/book/10.1007/9… A short 🧵…

Lloyd Walker retweeted
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Lex Fridman @lexfridman

4 years ago

I'm currently in Kyiv, hoping to interview President Zelenskyy and many other Ukrainian people from all walks of life. Please retweet to show support & to help make it happen. Love you all. - @ZelenskyyUa, @Ukraine @APUkraine - @DmytroKuleba, @MFA_Ukraine - @Klitschko, @Kyiv

Lloyd Walker retweeted
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Tim Urban @waitbutwhy

4 years ago

Water droplet at 6,000fps [nac Image Technology]

Lloyd Walker retweeted
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Tim Urban @waitbutwhy

4 years ago

Everything we call civilization was invented in the last 500 generations—way too short a time for our bodies and brains to re-optimize. We're a bunch of primates in a totally unnatural environment, trying our best. Good thing to keep in mind!

Lloyd Walker retweeted
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Mark Hamill @MarkHamill

4 years ago

May The First Not Be The Worst With You

Lloyd Walker retweeted
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Justin Mikolay 🛰️ @jmikolay

4 years ago

I’ve served aboard a nuclear submarine, worked at a multi-billion-dollar private tech company, and helped people lead the world’s largest organizations. Here are 20 of the most powerful, non-obvious ideas in professional life:

Lloyd Walker retweeted
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Brett Scott @Suitpossum

4 years ago

It sucks that our default way of describing the economy is as a giant competition between independent people, rather than as a large-scale collaboration between interdependent people

Lloyd Walker retweeted
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Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis

4 years ago

The way Elon Musk operates should be much more common for high-performing CEOs: Tackle a huge problem, put teams in place to work out the details and perform the day-to-day, and then move on to the next huge problem.

Lloyd Walker retweeted
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Elon Musk @elonmusk

5 years ago

Should be taught to all at a young age

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Joscha Bach @Plinz

5 years ago

Still happy to have been born on this Titanic; may be doomed but also the only place in the universe where I could get internet

Lloyd Walker retweeted
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Maria Popova @themarginalian

5 years ago

The Geometry of Grief – a mathematician on how fractals can help us fathom loss and reorient to the ongoingness of life themarginalian.org/2021/11/10/geo…

Lloyd Walker retweeted
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Jill Samani (Klinvex) @jillklinvex

5 years ago

We are hiring a Venture Principal to manage a geographically distributed team and own deal flow for @CapitalFactory, the most active early stage tech investor in Texas. Apply here 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼 @BryanDChambers @JoshuaBaer @gordondaugherty apply.workable.com/capital-factor…

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Terrible Maps @TerribleMaps

5 years ago

World map according to fish

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